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pfos029
Inspiring
April 26, 2018
Question

Indigo TOC Help: Topic Inserted into Multiple Books Defaults to First Placement

  • April 26, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 714 views

Hi All - I just realized in my Responsive HTML5 output that my TOC isn't behaving the way I anticipated.

I am using Robohelp 2017, with the Indigo Layout.

My Issue: I have a single topic page (e.g. "Getting Started") that is placed in multiple books within my TOC. Navigation from my Indigo homepage always defaults the TOC on the right of my topic page view to display the first iteration of the topic. Using the TOC structure below, if I were to navigate to 'Book 2' from the Indigo homepage and then select the 'Getting Started' topic, the topic page opens correctly, but the TOC on the right shows the structure as being under 'Book 1'. It always defaults to the first iteration and I don't know why?

Book 1

  • Getting Started
  • Topic 2
  • Topic 3

Book 2

  • Getting Started
  • Topic 4
  • Topic 5

Book 3

  • Getting Started
  • Topic 6
  • Topic 7

Is there a work around for this? My TOC and topics are organized by role at my organization and then as the user drills down it becomes more specific. Several topic pages are shared by multiple roles, thus my decision to place a single shared topic in multiple locations. I'm not sure what to do. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 26, 2018

I suspect the only way to get around this is to create "dummy" topics that insert the contents of the Getting Started topic as a snippet. Then your TOC pointers will always cycle back to the correct location within each book.

P
pfos029Author
Inspiring
April 27, 2018

Thank you Jeff. I hadn't thought of using snippets. Do you have any recommendations for quickly looking up how many topics are re-used throughout the TOC? I have a lot of topics that are used in multiple books and I'd have to go through one by one to determine the overall impact. Any suggestions to save time to remedy my TOC navigation issue would be appreciated.

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 27, 2018

Sorry, not really - this is more of a design tip for when you're creating a new project. In one of my company's products, the developers call a common program object to act in slightly different ways, so I had to use snippets with some conditioning in them to reflect the slight differences while still maintaining the common bits. In your case it sounds like you were using the exact same "Getting Started" topic in repeated spots, so changing it into a snippet and creating dummy topics to act as placeholders for the snippet content shouldn't take very long.

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